Tag Archives: Pattern

Searching for Music

New Dance(s): Pattern Dances including Line Dance and Set Partner Dances

I’ve been seeing more interest in what I’ll generically call pattern dances. By this, I mean dances that are set to specific choreography and then danced socially, either in a formation (e.g., line dances) or as partner dances. Since this strays far from my own dance experience, I am struggling both with terminology and how to provide effective support for this kind of dance. I also noticed the last time I looked, there is considerable support for things like step sheets, so I don’t want to duplicate effort, especially since places like CopperKnob seem to have this aspect well covered.

Finding new music for Pattern Dances

Community member tzielund reached out and reinforced my view that there are aspects of the music4dance database that could be particularly helpful for folks interested in these kinds of dances. The general idea is that since music4dance contains a significant catalog of songs categorized by dance style (in the, dare I say, conventional sense of ballroom and partner dances) as well as often containing tempo and meter information, one could look up a song on which a pattern dance was originally choreographed and find other songs that are similar. This is exactly what spurred this post. But it’s great to have someone with a line dance background come to the same conclusion.

Finding dances similar to a Pattern Dance

In addition, Tom succeeded in using the musci4dance database for something that’s almost the opposite of the above. Here’s my paraphrase of his journey: Someone asked on a line-dance forum for recommendations for dances similar to The Vibe, a dance set to the song “Vibe” by Mullally. Music4dance shows Vibe as West Coast Swing. He then looked for another song in music4dance with WCS and about 100 BPM.  There were plenty of matches ordered by dancability, but the first one he recognized as another line dance was Pontoon for the Little Big Town song of the same name. He said that he would never have made this connection mentally — Vibe is kind of a disco-style, while Pontoon is very much country.  But in his opinion, the dances are actually very similar in style, and even share some of the same steps.

How we’ve structured Pattern Dances

The other valuable thing  Tom provided was a list of songs he uses for line dances, along with names of the dances and other details. He and I then went back and forth a bit to structure a Pattern Dance category in music4dance that made sense to both of us, and I uploaded his information as a batch.

This is where we landed. I’d love to get feedback from others with knowledge in this area, as there is always room for improvement. And while the database of pattern dances is relatively small, I’ll still be able to do some restructuring relatively easily.

First, rather than trying to create a new dance in the database for each different kind of pattern dance, I created a single dance called Pattern and added a Line Dance tag to the dances to distinguish them from other types of pattern dances, like the partner pattern dances I’ve blogged about before.

Then, we decided that the name of the specific Line Dance and its choreographer are important pieces of information. For now, we’re adding them as comments on the dance tag. If I get enough interest, I can add specific searchable fields for these, but that’s a bigger lift, and I think a specially formatted comment field will work pretty well for now. If we stick to the format, by very specifically laying these as"Dance Name" by Choreographer Name, people should be able to search for dances easily. Putting quotes around the dance name helps the search index limit results to just the dances, rather than songs that include those words.

I’ve also added tags that Tom included for the dance level, such as Beginner and Intermediate.

Finally, Tom included links to the Step Sheets for each dance. I didn’t want to expose those without permission from the specific site he was referencing, but I plan to reach out to them to make sure they’re okay with these links and then decide how to handle them.

Again, I’m a bit out of my depth on these kinds of dances, so the more feedback I can get from people who are, the better I will be able to support them.

Step of the Month

The “Step of the Month” for June is to check your account management page. As you may have noticed, it is nice to see the songs another user has tagged (in this case, tzielund’s songs). This information is available only to other logged-in members of the community, so please consider making your information available by checking the “Share my Profile” option to improve other members’ experience (the alternative is that your votes and tags are attributed to an anonymous user, which is much less friendly).

Western Partner Dances and Line Dances?

One of the comments on my last post asked: A lot of our dance groups over here love to dance the partnered dance sea shells The song “Blue night” by Michael learns to Rock sings the song they dance to. Is there a list on your data base of similar songs to that one that…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc

Playlists for Ballroom DJs?

I recently heard from a member of the music4dance community who hosts a community social ballroom dance for which he builds a playlist. He uses music4dance to find song ideas, then manually builds a spreadsheet and feeds it back into Spotify to create the final playlist. I have a long-standing interest in making it easier…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc

Dance Styles

The dance styles page is accessible from the Music->Dance menu.  It provides a “table of contents” of the dance styles that we’ve used to categorize songs in our catalog.   Dance styles are also used as a special kind of tag that can be seen in the song lists and included in filters.

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc

Dance Tags

Dance tags are the heart of the music4dance database. They are the glue that holds dance styles and songs together. These tags are crowd-sourced from our users, our friends’ catalogs, and from public sources. The more that our members vote on dances, the more diverse our catalog will become. There are a number of places…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc

Music and Dance

Western Partner Dances and Line Dances?

7 Comments

One of the comments on my last post asked:

A lot of our dance groups over here love to dance the partnered dance sea shells The song “Blue night” by Michael learns to Rock sings the song they dance to. Is there a list on your data base of similar songs to that one that they can also dance Sea Shells to?

This question lead me down one of those beautiful rabbit holes that dance often does.

I had never heard of this dance, but I looked it up and found a YouTube video with the choreographer demonstrating the dance. It was 32 counts (four 8-counts) danced line of dance using a vocabulary that I’m not familiar with but would guess was some flavor of country dance.

Now, when I was learning to lead as a ballroom dancer, my teacher often put together a few eight counts of choreography that I could use so that I wouldn’t have to think as much about what my next move was and concentrate instead on leading my partner and making sure I didn’t run into anyone (or step on my partner’s feet). I understand this is a common technique in the Ballroom community. I ran across similar methods when learning social dances in group classes. So my first instinct was – this is just a slightly more formalized version of that technique – and it has the advantage that your follow knows that you will be doing this same sequence, so the lead should be much easier.

Following that thread, I listened to the song more closely and counted it out. It’s about 97BPM 4/4 and had the feel of an International Rumba or Bolero to me. This gave me the first level answer to the question of what else would someone play if people wanted to dance “Sea Shells” – I went to Advanced Search and selected Bolero and Rumba, limited the tempo to 95-99 BPM (an arbitrary bracket around 97 BPM) and sorted by the most popular – that resulted in this list. I’m convinced that someone who learned “Sea Shells” could dance it to any of the top songs on the list.

But I felt like I was missing something fundamental about this type of dance, and I dug deeper. I didn’t have to do much searching to find a “Dance Step Sheet” with the specific choreography that Dan and Kelly Alboro created. In fact, there were a bunch of places that listed this dance and described the steps. Poking around the websites that hosted such sheets, I found that this is a whole thing. Please pardon my ignorance here since I’m sure many people reading this post know more about such things than I do, but the concept of choreographing a few eight counts of a partner dance and naming it was completely new to me.

My understanding from a relatively brief perusal of these sites is that there is a branch of country dancing similar to line dancing where someone choreographs a number of eight counts using a specific vocabulary, teaches it at an event, and then a whole group of people can dance the same “dance.” The most experience I’ve had with these personally is Wedding Line Dances, but it seems like a fun experience. Doing this kind of dance with a partner rather than the individual line dances I’ve seen in the past feels like a great way to become more comfortable as a partner dancer. In any case, I’ll put a bunch of links at the bottom of this post to sites written by people who know a lot more about this than I do.

Back to the original question: Another answer is that some of the “Dance Step Sheets” for “Sea Shells” list an alternate song that it can be danced to. The song they list is “jumpin’ the jetty” by Coastline. Now, this is a song that shouts Swing to me and is considerably faster (126BPM) than “Blue Night.” So that blows my original thought out of the water. Here is a search for swing songs between 124 and 128BPM. Unsurprisingly, there is no overlap between this list and the one I generated for “Blue Night.” I suspect someone who knows the choreography well can probably dance it to any reasonably consistent 4/4 music at a wide range of tempos. For those who are less expert, there is perhaps an advantage to being on the slower side and having strong phrasing. And I’m sure there are plenty of folks who only want to dance this particular dance to the music that they learned it to in the first place. But as I’ve said repeatedly, I’m way out of my depths here, so if someone who actually knows something about this kind of dancing would care to jump in and help me out, please do.

The last thing I wanted to say about this subject is that I’ve had several requests to support country and line dances on the site. I plan to enable the more traditional country partner dances once I get past some infrastructure issues that are currently blocking me from adding a bunch of new dances. I’m confident I can do that and seed the lists from reliable sources to get something up and running despite my lack of specific knowledge of those dances. Then, hopefully members of the community who know more about those dances can add more. Please let me know if you’re interested in this feature. The more people raise their hands for this feature, the faster it will move up my TODO list.

I hadn’t devised a method for handling line dances before this, partly because I assumed they were all choreographed to a single song. It didn’t seem like the system I’d built would handle that very well. But based on this experience, I’ve come up with a way to “support” line dances without adding code. I’ll throw it out there, and if anyone wants to start adding line dances to the database, I’ll document it more closely and possibly even add some code to make the experience smoother. The idea is pretty simple. Just add a comment with a quoted version of the name of the line dance to the song. Then, people can search on that and get a list of songs to line dance to. Here’s the search for “Sea Shells,” which returns the two songs I’ve discussed in this post.

I will dig myself out of the rabbit hole for now and see if I can make some progress on the infrastructure issue I mentioned above.

Please let me know if you have any thoughts about the subject of this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. And if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

Some interesting links related to the Western Partner dances:

Copper Knowb Stepsheets

DiceMemory Parter / Circle Dances

DiceMemory Line Dance Steps

CoutryDancingTonight – 10 Popular Partner Country Dances

Wikipedia – Partner Dance

Wikipedia – Country Western Dance

Wikipedia – Round Dance